Greetings List Lurkers,
The bad news is that it is another gorgeous day here in Barre City. At
SugarTower, the now self supporting Leonardo DaVinci Barn calls me...
The worst news is that State and Federal tax filings are due by COB today.
On this later subject, I have discovered an interesting but subtle
software bias in the State of Vermont forms. If you open the 2020 HS-122
form in a current copy of "evince", the official PDF editor for Linux
Mint, the form-fill function operates as expected until you arrive at the
HI-144, which is concatenated to the HS-122, (God knows why). This
segment of the form is NOT fillable with the open source "evince" PDF
viewer/filler. Your option is to read it into LibreOffice Draw and
laboriously stick the numbers in essentially in manual mode. Most
tedious...
However, if you have a closed source Acrobat product, like "acroread"
(Last supported: Adobe Adobe Reader 9 Version 9.5.5 crufty dated
04/26/2013
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-adobe-acrobat-reader-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-linux ) both the HS-122 and HI-144 sections of this form are suddenly fillable.
This I discovered after going through the pain and suffering of using
LibreOffice Draw to fill the HI-144 portion of the HS-122 form.
I find this an interesting and disturbing form of discrimination against
the use of Open Source tools, and an excellent way for the Vermont
Department of Revenue to discourage the yearly application for residential
tax credit.
The question is how can we as Vermont Citizens rectify this? I believe
that the Vermont Department of Revenue should be compelled to support Open
Source Software standards.
Anyway, enjoy Tax filing day. The work around is to use the very crufty
version of Adobe Reader 9 Version 9.5.5 dated 04/26/2013. Let me know if
you need the Debian-ized version of this package.
Anyway, come on to Jitsi at 6PM! We can discuss entrenched bureaucracy.
Again, this meeting I will let Jit.si do the heavy lifting, it seems to work
just fine.
Anyway, after my Tax forms are in the mail, Feel free to click the
following link to join the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/bosi
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Just want to dial in on your phone?
Dial-in: +1.512.402.2718 PIN: 1992759198#
Note that this dial in worked with devastating effect from the road...
Click this link to see the dial in phone numbers for this meeting
https://meet.jit.si/static/dialInInfo.html?room=bosi
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint,
UberBashKommander
(802) 479-2360
(802) 595-9365 Cell
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